Unfortunately I did not win NaNoWriMo this year, but I came close – which is in itself a minor miracle given how far I’d fallen behind in the latter stages of the month. My final wordcount came in at 40,512 words. Not fantastic, but certainly not terrible either. I’m going to continue working on the NaNo, albeit at a much more relaxed pace ; I might even manage to turn out something decent with enough time.

Fortunately, Movember was a much more successful endaevour, and I’m proud to say I managed to raise £110 for charity with my ridiculous ‘tache in the last few days of Movember. Not a huge amount of money but not too bad for a few days of fundraising. Thanks to those of you who donated and if you feel like it you can still donate to improve that total. Go on, I’ll still be here when you return.

With November over this blog will continue and will be updated with my attempts at photography and various rants about the numerous things that annoy me. Lucky you.

As November goes ever onwards I find my NaNoWriMo wordcount falling short most days. This is partly due to my inability to wrangle the story where I want it to go, partly because the difficult days have discouraged me, and partly because of a series of time-consuming problems which have eaten into my writing time.

Aside from work, I have had to contend with a boiler failure at home (which has taken far more time and energy to sort out than it really should), illness, searching for a new flat (we have to move at the beginning of January), and a devastating lack of sleep. All of which makes writing extremely difficult at best. In the interests of full disclosure I must admit to socialising more than perhaps I needed to as well.

Today was a good day though. I managed to write over 5,000 words, which has helped me catch up a bit. At 21,727 words I am now 43% of the way to the target. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I am 7,873 words behind schedule as I type this, meanig that I must now type 3,142 words per day for the next 9 days. That’s an imposing number, but with a few more days like today I could make it yet, so I’m not quite ready to give up.

I still don’t feel that I have anything I want to show to the world yet. I think I will probably keep my NaNo to myself; at least until I’ve had chance to finish a first draft (the full novel will be significantly more than 50,000 words) and an opportunity to do at least one re-draft so that it doesn’t look too amateurish. However I can reveal that my NaNo is a swashbuckling science fiction story about a gifted boy engineer who joins the crew of a small trading and sometime buccanneer vessel called the ‘Dead Man’s Hand’. I decided that sci-fi was a good genre to start my first NaNo with because so much can be explained away off the cuff, although I’m trying to keep the science elements as reasonable and realistic as possible.

It’s been a week since I started both NaNoWriMo and Movember, and you’ll no doubt have noticed that I haven’t blogged much about it yet. Writing, it seems, gets in the way of writing.

So, as expected I’ve been doing a lot of sitting at a desk and typing; although not actually enough so far. I should have written some 11,169 words by now, so I am 2,903 words behind (or just under two days in NaNo-time). Partly this is because my life is generally pretty busy, but it’s also because new impediments to writing seem to spring up all the time.

Towards the end of last week, for example, I was rudely awakened by a loud dripping noise at 5am to discover my boiler leaking, and then was unable to sleep, which led to a very unproductive day. I was also unable to make my wordcount over the weekend due to being kidnapped by @abiknipe for a weekend away in Portsmouth, which was fantastic and probably warrants a blog post itself if I can ever find the time.

One of my friends has suggested that I post a sentence or two that I am most pleased with each day. I’m considering it, but the truth is that due to writing under harsh time constraints a lot of my output is very rough, to be revised after November, and I’m not sure I’m ready for it to be read. However there is the odd bit that I am very pleased with, so I may post some excerpts over the coming days.

I now find myself having to write a new daily average of some 1,874 words per day. Back to the novel it is then…

November, month of exciting challenges and endless frustration, is now upon me. Freshly shaven, I anticipate keenly becoming ever more hirsute as the month progresses. As yet, I have written nothing of my novel for NaNoWriMo, and I am already starting to panic about my ability to finish the job.

Frankly, starting to write anything has always been the most difficult part of writing for me. The blank page stares back at me from the computer like some incredibly smug challenger, confident that I cannot possibly win. This isn’t helped by the fact that I have two conflicting ideas for my novel, and I just can’t decide which to write.And it’s started to strike me that 50,000 words in 30 days is a lot of writing. I have to average 1667 words per day in order to make the grade. Not so bad, you might think, and in terms of sheer typing you’d be right. However I have to find the time to commit to writing amongst my normal life and busy work schedule. Furthermore I have no idea, for the most part, how the plot of my novel is going to progress. Thinking time must be factored in.